Ezekiel 39
EDTEzekiel 39:1-29
A thoroughly immoral * man* could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first * love* the thing, sympathize with it; that is, be * virtuously* related to it. If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous line at every turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the. selfish, and the pusillanimous person a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small; for the use of the day merely.
Carlyle, * Heroes,* III.
Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.
Ruskin.
References. XXXIX. 25. C. A. Marshall, * Christian World Pulpit,* vol. xlii. 1892, p. 394. XL. 2, 3. W. W. Battershall, * Interpretations of Life and Religion,* p. 127.